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Prejudice in Elfen Lied
' ' Prejudice is quite literally the act of pre-judging another individual based on certain biased sets of outward criteria rather than on the merits of the individual being so judged. Very often, this action can reveal as much if not more about the judger than about those they stand over in artificial judgement. Often, the reasons for the judging are based on misinformation or information that is not fully revealed or spoken of in proper context. To say that the whole of the world of Elfen Lied was affected by this trait is yet a vast understatement. 'Against The Diclonii' The most obvious in-series example of this sort of hateful thinking comes in the virtual dismissal of people like Kaede, Nana, and other Silpelits, and, looking back in history, the treatment given to the Kakuzawas' ancestors. Kaede's life was touched by prejudice from almost her first moments on Earth, at the hands of her own father, who left her to die in a forest via exposure, almost certainly for the horns she was born with. This led to her being placed in the Kamakura-area orphanage. The orphans existed in a world of being looked down upon themselves, and, at least in the case of Japan's culture, stood very little chance of being adopted, since the same relatives who may not have elected to take them in also frequently vetoed their being adopted by other familes, viewing this as an insult to the family name. For the workers there, the assignment was not a choice one, and so a cycle of societal glares looking down upon each layer of the orphanage's existence began with Kaede at the dead bottom, the most isolated of the isolated, and made to feel ever more miserable for this reason alone. Kaede's defense against all this was to shut down, which led to her being pre-judged on yet another level, this time as being freakishly unemotional. Barely-hidden words and gestures of contempt from the caretakers fed that of the children in turn, making it seem to some like Kaede was fair game for any number of cruel pranks and taunts. While at least some of these seemed to be punished, the very persistence of the prejudice and hate itself never being truly addressed only seemed to escalate matters. Whether or not the young girl who seemingly befriended and may have betrayed Kaede ever actually thought that hurting her was not the same as hurting 'a real person', it seems certain that some at the orphanage thought exactly that. While the death of her beloved puppy is often cited as the catalyst for Kaede's transformation into the Lucy persona, in fact this cruelty was merely a confirmation that she was forever 'other' in the eyes of those around her, and could not ever escape a judgement no action of hers had ever played a part in. This feeling would pervade Kaede's life ever after. It prevented her from fully trusting Kouta at first, and then to assume the worst of him when an apparent betrayal reared its head. At the fateful carnival, in a crowd bustling and unsympathetic to her apparent pain, Kaede notably chose to kill a woman offering aid, now pre-judging all Humans as betrayers waiting for her to drop her guard. Nor would life at the Diclonius Research Institute aid her in stopping this. Her first hours there were met with the sad news of Aiko Takada's fate and a searing lecture from a somewhat hypocritical Kurama about how Diclonius were the ones rejecting peaceful co-existence with Humans. Sadly, he had based this lecture, which hardened Kaede's heart still further, on his own sad history. He seemed in this instance to forget how he had once objected to the experimentation on the Diclonii girls at the facility, and, astonishingly for a scientist, to neglect seeing that the violent Silpelits he in essence cited as evidence got their vectors at an age well below that of reason. Kurama merely judged Kaede as the source of all he had suffered, pre-judging her as a complete monster rather than even bothering to question her for insight into the beings he saw as his foes. Like most prejudice, Kurama's feelings were a mixture of real and verifiable information plus extrapolations and leaps in logic driven by pain, fear, and in his case, grief. Nana experienced, at least from her point of view, a different form of prejudice, after she was sent away from the Institute. Her clothes damaged in her fight with Bando, she assumed that the stares she got in town were from her state of dress. In fact, it was likely again her horns, but she had no way of understanding this. Perhaps most sadly of all, while the Kakuzawas remembered well and frequently cited the discrimination and persecution their horned ancestors received, this gave them no insight at all into the wrongness of such prejudice. Besides the 'Humans' (of which they were really), they also looked down upon the Silpelit population as mere disposable worker drones, to be experimented on, harvested for parts, or abused in the most hideous ways imaginable. Worse still, painted by their government as experts on the subject, the Kakuzawas were able to confirm the genocidal course the government wanted, eliminating even the outside chance of peace with the Diclonius. 'Against non-horned Humans' Turned on its head, the prejudice against 'normal' Humans would prove no less deadly nor any less tragic in what it caused. The Japanese government could not have picked a worse point man on the issue of the Diclonii births than Chief Kakuzawa. Seething resentment lingered alongside a minor genetic mutation regarding the treatment of his ancestors, the discrimination they suffered not only turned on its head but in that reversal, raised to cult status. Just as ancient non-horned Japanese rejected rational explanations for their horns in favor of demonic ones, so did the ancient Kakuzawas ( a name deriving from 'Valley Of The Horned Ones') reject the rational in favor of a pseudo-mystical/euegnics explanation, turning their persecuted group in their own eyes into a master race whose only flaw was intermarriage among 'Humans' diluting their bloodline. Like with Kaede, their supposed 'savior' centuries down the line, they came to the almost Addams/Munsters-esque conclusion that they were the real people, and everyone else the freaks and monsters. This pride of place, artificially pumped up by dismissing virtually everyone else on the planet, pushed the family to gain political, social and economic power, not to mention achieving scientific and academic standing few families could ever compare to. But this often came at a price. Their delusions would cause any member of their family not born with the vestigial horns to feel an outcast and inferior in their own clan. While Anna Kakuzawa was the only member depicted to not have horns, it seems likely it had occurred before, as there was no talk of banishing or putting her down. It was perhaps written off to the supposed dilution of their blood line. It is even concievable that Anna was never pushed to achieve the way, say, her older brother Professor Kakuzawa was, with her family believing it pointless, or more subtly never asking of her what they believed she could never achieve. The Kakuzawas' hideous oversight of the Silpelit girls under their care was a boiler-plate for anti-Human feelings to fester. Category:Real Lied